Before any major conference, digital health founders spend hours refining their story. They polish the deck, sharpen the elevator pitch, and prepare to explain why their product matters.
Then the exhibit hall opens.
A benefits leader stops at the booth of a startup focused on workplace stress and resilience. She’s considering solutions for her workforce, and the founder walks her through strong engagement, promising outcomes, and retention that beats the industry average.
Her first question changes the conversation: Who did you actually study?
The founder hesitates. The data is real, but it came from a small group of highly motivated early users, not the thousands of employees this buyer would need the product to serve.
Then come the follow-ups. How was the evidence generated? Was it simply a look back at existing data, or something more rigorous? Has anyone outside the company reviewed it? Is anything published? And how does it compare with the two vendors she just met who already have peer-reviewed results?
These aren’t hostile questions. They’re the questions serious buyers, investors, payers, and partners eventually ask.
At conferences like BHT and HLTH, founders may hear them repeatedly across booth conversations, investor meetings, buyer introductions, and coffee chats. But they don’t disappear when the conference ends. They surface in enterprise sales, fundraising, partnerships, RFPs, and due diligence.
Wherever the conversation happens, the underlying question is the same: What evidence can you actually stand behind?
What Investors, Buyers, and Partners Are Actually Asking
What counts as strong evidence depends on who’s asking.
An investor wants to know whether risk has meaningfully declined and whether the evidence supports the next stage of growth.
An enterprise buyer or health system wants to know whether the product will work for its population, fit its workflow, and deliver outcomes that matter inside its organization.
A payer or employer wants credible clinical and economic value, not only engagement.
A strategic partner wants to know whether the relationship creates measurable value while reducing reputational and operational risk.
Rock Health’s H1 2026 market analysis points to rising expectations for digital health companies to demonstrate measurable value. As buyers face more options, expectations for measurable ROI are rising, while investors are increasingly focused on the qualities that create durable advantage. A broad claim such as “science-backed” will not answer the questions they are asking. A specific, well-supported claim can.
The Seven Evidence Questions to Prepare For
The first four questions follow the four foundations of a defensible evidence base: Problem, Population, Solution, and Outcomes. We explored this framework in more detail in a piece I authored for the Hemingway community, How to Build Scientific Credibility as a Digital Mental Health Business. The final three questions focus on whether the evidence is credible, the claim is defensible, and the next step is aligned with the business.
1. Is the problem real, urgent, and costly for this audience?
A strong product does not matter if the person across the table is not convinced the problem deserves attention now.
Be ready to show how often the problem you’re solving occurs, who experiences it, what it costs, and what happens when it remains unsolved. Match the evidence to the stakeholder. For a workplace mental health platform, evidence that employees are struggling may establish the need. But an employer buyer may care more about whether that problem is contributing to absenteeism, turnover, healthcare costs, lost productivity, or low engagement with existing benefits.
2. Who is your evidence actually about?
Who was included? Who was not? How similar were participants to the people this stakeholder serves?
If the evidence comes from highly engaged early adopters, say so. If the next opportunity involves adolescents, Medicaid members, rural patients, or another population that has not yet been studied, be clear about that limitation and explain how you plan to strengthen the evidence for that population.
3. Does the solution work as intended?
Before claiming impact, show that people can use the product, will use it, and find value in it.
For an early-stage company, that may mean demonstrating feasibility (can it be delivered as intended), usability (can people use it easily), engagement (do they actually use it), and workflow fit (does it fit into daily life or care delivery). These signals may be more useful than rushing into an outcomes study before the product is ready.
4. What changed, and did the change matter?
Do not stop at “users improved.”
Name the outcome, measure, time frame, sample size, and size of the change. Then explain why it matters to the stakeholder and decision at hand. Clinical symptoms, retention, satisfaction, access, utilization, and cost can all be valuable, but they answer different questions.
5. How was the evidence generated?
Be ready to explain the design in plain language.
Was this customer discovery, a feasibility study, a retrospective analysis, a prospective pilot, or a randomized trial? Were validated measures used? Was the work reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, an external scientific advisor, or peer reviewers?
The method should be strong enough for the claim and appropriate for the company’s stage.
The right level of rigor changes as a company grows. Our previous blog, What Investors Mean by “Evidence” in Digital Health Fundraising, explains how expectations can differ across Seed, Series A, and later-stage conversations.
6. What can you defend today, and what is still a hypothesis?
Replace “we are seeing strong engagement” with the behavior you actually observed: “65% of users completed at least three sessions in their first month.” Replace “our early results are promising” with something like: “In a 20-person pilot, anxiety scores declined over four weeks, but we do not yet know whether those changes will hold in a larger or more diverse population.”
Precision does not make an early evidence base look weak. It shows that the team understands what the evidence does and does not support.
7. What decision should the next evidence step unlock?
A question at a conference may expose a real evidence gap, but that does not mean the answer is automatically a large validation study.
Be ready to explain what you plan to study next and why. Does the company need to refine the product, strengthen an investor narrative, support an enterprise sale, prepare for a payer pilot, or validate a claim?
Then identify the smallest credible evidence step that could reduce uncertainty and move that business decision forward.
The Right Evidence Is Not Always the Biggest Study
For one early-stage company developing a digital solution for chronic pain, the most useful next step was not a randomized trial. The immediate question was whether the product worked in practice well enough to support continued development and investor conversations.
A four-week usability pilot with 19 patients, a focus group with eight users, and interviews with four healthcare providers surfaced feature needs, retention drivers, and questions about clinical and workflow fit. Those findings informed the product roadmap, sharpened go-to-market messaging, and strengthened the company’s investor story.
This was not the highest possible level of rigor. It was the right level of rigor for the company’s stage and the decision it needed to make.
Run This Pre-Conference Evidence Audit
Before BHT or HLTH, take a few minutes to pressure-test the evidence you are bringing into investor, buyer, and partner conversations:
- Define the business goal. What should the next investor, buyer, or partner conversation unlock?
- Inventory the evidence. What are the three strongest proof points the company can defend, including useful evidence from customer interviews, product data, pilot feedback, or operational data?
- Locate the strategic gap. Which area is weakest for this stakeholder: Problem, People, Solution, or Outcomes?
- Choose a practical next step. What is the smallest credible research or analysis step that would reduce uncertainty around the next business decision?
- Prepare the language. Write one sentence for the strongest claim, one for its limit, and one for what the company plans to study next.
An evidence gap does not have to derail the conversation. Say what is known, how it is known, and what comes next. A stakeholder is more likely to trust a founder who understands the limits of the evidence than one who stretches a claim past the data.
For a deeper look at how evidence can support credibility, investor readiness, payer adoption, product decisions, and growth at different stages, read Fit Minded’s Closing the Proof Gap white paper.
Final Takeaway
The questions that come up at conferences are often the same ones that surface in investor pitches, buyer meetings, payer conversations, and partnership discussions. The founders who handle those conversations best will not necessarily have the most data. They will know what they can prove, what they cannot prove yet, and which evidence would help unlock the next business decision.
Do the audit before the conference, pitch, or sales meeting. Choose the strongest claim you can defend. Know the gap someone is likely to find. Walk in ready to talk about both.
If the same evidence question keeps surfacing in your investor, payer, or buyer conversations, book time with the Fit Minded team. We can help identify what the question is really asking you to prove.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Evidence Should Digital Health Founders Bring to BHT or HLTH?
Prepare a concise evidence inventory rather than trying to cover every result available. Know your strongest proof points across Problem, People, Solution, and Outcomes; who the evidence is actually about; how each result was generated; the most important limitation; and what you plan to study next.
What Do Digital Health Investors Ask During Due Diligence?
Investors typically want to know whether the company has reduced meaningful product, market, clinical, or execution risk. They may ask who was studied, what changed, how the evidence was generated, whether the findings support the company’s claims, and how the team is using what it learned to inform the business.
Does a Digital Health Startup Need Clinical Validation Before Fundraising?
Not always. Early-stage companies may first need evidence that the product works in practice, including usability, feasibility, engagement, or analysis of existing data, before they need a large clinical outcomes study.
A small, well-designed study tied to the next fundraising decision can be more useful than a larger study that does not address the most important uncertainty.
How Should Founders Discuss Incomplete Evidence With Buyers?
Be precise. State what was tested, in whom, over what time, and what the results do and do not support. If the buyer serves a population you have not yet studied, be clear about that gap and explain how you plan to strengthen the evidence. Then connect the next evidence step to the decision the buyer is trying to make.
Clear limits build more trust than a broad claim that outruns the data.
Turn evidence gaps into your next growth opportunity.